Association - Memory Methods and Tools for photographic memory

Association is the basis of all learning. If you are not able to understand anything, it is not because your mental faculties are not up to the level of the problem but the teacher is not associating it properly with what you already know. We don’t learn anything independent of our knowledge repository. Everything fit and associate with what we already know. We learn from Imitating, analogy or basics. If we learn from analogy, we are basing it in relation to something we already know. If we choose the last method of learning i.e. learning from basics; we relate it to our basic knowledge.

If we don’t understand something, it simply means we did not associate it properly. Association can be done by various methods, including rhyming, chunking, linking, repeating, networking etc.  Our brain has neurons and synapses. Synapses are path among neurons. So our brain is a vast network of neurons. When we create associations, we create paths among neurons, and stronger the associations, better the paths. To create stronger associations we must use more senses while learning something. The focus is also important, as better focus results in less noise in associations.

Our memory is finite and our brain can retain all trivial data. So it only retains data that may be useful for us. This system is developed through an evolutionary process, i.e. it is a survival mechanism. From an evolutionary point of view, a individuals survival and his progeny’s survival is most important. So our brain is trained to pay attention to Mating process, Food, and danger. And our brain selects what is to remember and what is not, based on these evolutionary priorities. Our emotions and senses are also sensitive to these things. But it’s not tribal age anymore and in today’s society, we have some new functions to perform, mainly cerebral. So we can draw two conclusions from all these things- 1) Our mind is not naturally developed for today’s hyper-information age. So we must train it, use workaround methods, leverage our evolutionary developed brain ( By leveraging its priority of survival ) and use already existed hardware ( brain components ) for new software ( New kind of Information retaining and processing ).

 To better remember something, you must associate strong, provocative, exciting pictures with it. For example; we will remember better shocking or unexpected events of our life. Even though from a logical point of view these events may be insignificant, but because these were shocking or unexpected, they use more emotions and senses and register better in our memory. Keep in mind to visualize vividly.

We must also move things that we want to remember, as from evolutionary perspective moving things were more important than stationary things. So while imagining a thing, we must animate or move it. We must watch things in action.

We must also leverage our senses to retain information better. We can associate smells, picture, texture, and taste with things to remember.Other than that we should also make things brighter, more colorful and larger.